People who animate Genesis 2-8 characters for games, what is your workflow?

Alley Rat

Hi all,

I'm setting up a pipeline for animating characters. Just doing run/walk cycles, jumps, etc. to layer in a game engine. The $5 interactive license sales has really lit a fire under me as it removed the last block to making 3D games as a one-man team. Do you use DAZ Studio, or do you export to Blender or some other tool and animate there? Is there something like Poser's Walk Designer for any of the Genesis versions?

Thanks! 

nonesuch00

Strange Voyager said:

Hi all,

I'm setting up a pipeline for animating characters. Just doing run/walk cycles, jumps, etc. to layer in a game engine. The $5 interactive license sales has really lit a fire under me as it removed the last block to making 3D games as a one-man team. Do you use DAZ Studio, or do you export to Blender or some other tool and animate there? Is there something like Poser's Walk Designer for any of the Genesis versions?

Thanks! 

They are a boat load of free and paid "standard animations' you'd need for a typical FPS or role playing game available in the Unity store. You'd target those to the imported DAZ or Poser model. It's quite easy actually as i've managed it even as far back as 2012 in 15 minutes with no YouTube videos, PDFs, books or anything. Unity has only gotten better since then.

All I did was I exported the DAZ / Poser models using the DAZ Studio or Poser FBX export function. Looking (searching on the internet) up which of those FBX export options I wanted to check in the export of the FBX files was the most difficult part, eg I wanted to morphs in the Toon Generations One model to be available in Unity as Blendshapes so I had to in DAZ Studio FBX Export explicitly export all those morphs but not the null morphs, JCMs, MCMs, and other morphs unrelated to the character(s) I wanted available in Unity. So I suggest you search on a search engine if you want text or on YouTube on how to export FBX from DAZ Studio / Poser. The import of the resulting FBX into Unity is pretty fool proof.

If you actually want to animate yourself and it look excellent, LOL, well I've tried that too, and it's hard, very hard, and mine look not so good so I can't really offer you advice there except when you do choose a solution to creating bespoke animations that you like you can export the unskinned animations themselves out as FBX format & import them into Unity and retarget them to your model. Now Unity itself has added and has had for a long while animation editoring features in their game editor and are expanding those capabilities, but I've not tried them because as I said creating good animations sans motion capture is very hard. As these animations you create need to be seemlessly looped you need to do that as well. There are tutorials you can search for on how to do that in Unity. If you are making a film but not a game in Unity/UE4 you don't need to learn how to seemlessly loop the bespoke animations you create.

For your animation attempts, because time is money and money is time I suggest trying, if you really want to animate yourself, and not buy created animations:

1) First try Blender and export your results as FBX to retarget in Unity (or in UE4). Search YouTube for a boatload of tutorials on the how-tos.

2) Not satisfied with the ease of Blender's animation tools? Keep at it anyway for 3 months and then buy a 3 month subscription to only Motion Builder and see how you like that. It's supposed to make it easier to cleanup mocap animations for starters from what I've read.

3) Don't like either. Some use iClone. Some use other solutions as there are a lot of them, but I doubt any will negate the fact that animating without motion capture is difficult.

 

Alley Rat

Awesome, thank you. I am developing in C++ rather than Unity, but I could still use Unity for animation I guess. It has decent animation tools on top of the premade animations available in the Asset Store. I have iClone, but it seems like there are a lot of arbitrary paywalls for content transfer. I can loop and blend animations in code. I'll also check out Blender. I've been sort of edging into it anyway as I use it here or there for small single tasks (glTF conversion, simple model generation for testing, etc). 

nonesuch00

Strange Voyager said:

Awesome, thank you. I am developing in C++ rather than Unity, but I could still use Unity for animation I guess. It has decent animation tools on top of the premade animations available in the Asset Store. I have iClone, but it seems like there are a lot of arbitrary paywalls for content transfer. I can loop and blend animations in code. I'll also check out Blender. I've been sort of edging into it anyway as I use it here or there for small single tasks (glTF conversion, simple model generation for testing, etc). 

The same generally applies for UE4 or Lumberjack or CryTek as well although you'll have to do their tutorials to know how to do things 'their way'.

I personally think and will do myself, for bespoke animations I create myself, Blender and export the animations only unskinned via the 'Better FBX' product ($30 or $40) in the BlenderMarket.com,

Here is a sort of short summary by another user of the animation options they've tried. Pay special attention to the Blender portion. That is what I'm doing too.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5922696/#Comment_5922696

 

Alley Rat

Wow! Thank you. I had not seen that post. It looks like I'll be picking up some Blender plug-ins next week. I did a trial of Maya LT but Blender seems more accessible and versatile (and this is coming from someone who has used Maya off and on since 1.0). The bit about G2M being the most usable makes me happy since my main character and some of my favorite NPCs are all G2M-based (and I invested most heavily in G2M since that's usable in Carrara and Poser as well). I will probably use this video as the basis for my game animations, as this will be my first time animating a game character.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNidsMesxSE

As I learn more about game animation programming, this seems like it will be useful. I will use those Blender plug-ins for now, but as I grow my skills and learn more about what I actually need/like/use, I intend to buld my own pipeline tools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjTU0yKS00

WendyLuvsCatz

I export FBX and retarget it in iClone 3DX6 using my own custom setup with bone based facial animation

add any extra iMotion plus files I want for dialogue

then re-export and import into Unreal Engine 4 and retarget the mannequin motions to it

are a few tutorials around on that but most important is having the hip as animation and the rest as skeleton

Alley Rat

Do you prefer to animate in iClone or Unreal Engine, and why?

WendyLuvsCatz said:

I export FBX and retarget it in iClone 3DX6 using my own custom setup with bone based facial animation

add any extra iMotion plus files I want for dialogue

then re-export and import into Unreal Engine 4 and retarget the mannequin motions to it

are a few tutorials around on that but most important is having the hip as animation and the rest as skeleton

 

WendyLuvsCatz

iclone pretty easy so yeah there 

CypherFOX

Greetings,

I'm idly (more as a dilettante than as a focused project) writing an importer directly from DUF into Unity.

It's...fascinatingly hard.

--  Morgan

 

Ellessarr

hmm well i'm a bit of a "cheat" because i'm using mixamo animations in my game while using daz characters( retargeting the animations to daz characters) but sometimes i need to "do some adjusts to the animations inside unreal

 

here a image of the game:

it's a sort of "classic hack& slash, based on old 2.5D games like dungeons and dragons, golden axe and knight of the round (my sources of inspiration), i'm still working on characters mechanics and stuck in the combo part, but i'm thinking in leave it for now and focus on others things which i do know how to do like the "UI"(life bar and score points), then add the enemies then only later go back to the combo when everything is working fine.

 

Ofcourse the mixamo animations are tempoary place holds until i can add better animations, but since i'm a "one man team" i can't afford to waist too much time in animations and trying to buy manys as i can to focus only in programing.

 

here a front image of the 2 characters( the game vision is side scroll, since the game is 2.5D).

 

lol ignore the "weird arrow" in the "weird place", lol, that arrow is from unreal used for you to "proper position the character in game" (to know to which side he is looking).